Lalwani takes award, but gives away prize

It made the longlist of the Booker prize, and the shortlist of the Costa first novel award, but last night Nikita Lalwani's Gifted, an ambitious and widely acclaimed debut novel about immigration and the perils of a precocious childhood, has taken the final step, carrying off the inaugural Desmond Elliott prize.

But Lalwani will not be carrying home the £10,000 winner's cheque, and plans to donate it instead to human rights campaigners Liberty.

Speaking this morning, Lalwani confessed that it was an impulsive decision. "I hadn't planned to give the money away because I really didn't think I would win," she said. "But when it happened, I just felt it was the right thing to do. We live at a time when we can't take personal freedoms and civil liberties for granted any more - in this country as in others - so an organisation which campaigns on these issues deserves our support."

According to Lalwani, civil liberties are at the heart of the winning book. "My novel is set at a time when the culture of immigrant influx was very much a dualist one," she said. "After all, the setting [around 1972] occurs not long after the 'Rivers of Blood' speech.

"Civil liberties affect all of us", she said, "and the desire to break up cultural prejudices of 'them and us' is very much a part of my book."

Lalwani was born in Rajasthan in 1973 but raised and educated in Cardiff. Gifted tells the story of Rumi Vasi, a child maths prodigy, and her slow escape from the clutches of an overbearing father, as the simultaneous equations and Rubik's cubes challenges begin to lose their charms.

Although the novel relates loosely to the author's own Cardiff childhood, Lalwani is clear that the book is less an autobiography than an "alternative history". Lalwani was also very good at maths as a child, but her father dissuaded her from taking maths O-level early. "I was never in the prodigy camp," she explained, never solving more than one side of the Rubik's cube herself.

"I was interested in maths because there's an innocence to the subject at that age. You put the numbers together and, like a magic trick, it all comes together. I remember that experience being very comforting as a child, at a time when I felt my personal experience marginalised."

To win the prize, Lalwani saw off strong competition, including the clear favourite for the award, Tom Rob Smith's Child 44, for which William Hill had quoted odds to win of 1/2, the shortest ever listed for a literary prize.

The Desmond Elliott prize was established this year, in memory of the debonair publisher and agent who died in 2003, aiming to reward debut novels which combine "intelligence" and "broad appeal". Besides Lalwani and Rob Smith, John Walsh's Sunday at The Cross Bones was also in the running for the inaugural prize.

Although Lalwani has chosen to pass on the £10,000 prize money, she expressed her appreciation of the award's commitment to supporting new writers.

"It was also great to be in touch with the joie de vivre surrounding Desmond Elliott, who had obviously made a deep impression on publishing and writing. It felt like a very personal prize, redolent of a time when a single individual could really imprint their own personality on the process of bartering and exchange in publishing."